Stocks: Dow Jones average drops Exxon

The Dow Jones industrial average kicked out ExxonMobil, the index’s oldest member, in its biggest shake-up in seven years, said Sarah Ponczek and Katherine Greifeld in Bloomberg.com. The rejection marks “a stunning fall from grace” for Exxon, “the world’s biggest company as recently as 2011.” It has been part of the Dow index since 1928, when it was called Standard Oil of New Jersey. But the market’s embrace of technology stocks comes at the expense of the oil giant; Pfizer and Raytheon Technologies were also removed this week. In their place come Honeywell International, biotech firm Amgen, and Salesforce, “one of the best-performing stocks” of the last decade.